New Semester at SDU

Schedule board in front of our classroom

Spring Semester, Feb. 23 - June 19

Our University Rep gave us a super schedule this semester. Elwin and I are teaching the 5 sophomore classes that I had from last semester, and 4 freshman classes, 2 from my last semester and 2 new ones. The best 2 things are:

1. Elwin and I team-teach 5 of the 7 classes: With 50+ students in each of our oral English class, team-teaching seems to be an answer to the problems of giving students opportunities to practice their speaking skills. It's working well so far.
2. All our classes are on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays: this gives us a chance to travel China. So far, we have gone to Suzhou (about 1 1/2 hours west of Shanghai) and hope to visit other places too.

Medical students - about half male and half female in most classes
Boys and girls don't sit together unless you assign seats.

To add varieties to our Oral English classes, we've been using music Power Point in each of our classes. A wonderful lady who works as a BYU China teacher in Tienjian puts together wonderful songs with lyrics on PPT. Students sing along and practice their speaking skills. We have had some comments like: we look forward to going to the oral English class to listen to the beautiful music and practice our English. So far, we have used Celine Deon and Il Divo's "I believe in you", Wang Fei's "Eyes on you", Garth Brooks' "the river", and John Denver's "Country Roads". The girls love to sing along, but the most of the boys just mouth the words, whic is great too.

We also have a topic for each week where we do a short lecture and let the students do presentations one by one for 2 minutes. The students take this very seriously and usually write up a script to read. We have to encourage them not to use the script, but then they memorize the whole thing. The Chinese students have unbelievable memory skills. This came from their training in education. I am constantly amazed at how much people remember here. I would go to a store and the clerk would say, "ya, you were here 5 weeks ago and you bought a pink shirt in what size and how much you paid". It freaks me out sometimes, but then I remember they are very good at remembering things because of their training in schools.

The students work hard. Each group of 8 students work together and bring 3 words to post on the board. They usually have 18 or 21 words each week to work on. We give them a 3-minute vocabulary quiz at the beginning of each class. They do pretty well.

We also help them with difficult pronunciation, words and sounds, such as th, v, words end with consonants, etc. Elwin is very good at identifying those sounds and help the students a great deal with their pronunciation. I can see students gaining more confidence in their conversation.

This is the end of our 4th week. Time is flying...